Related papers: Braided surfaces and their characteristic maps

We study a novel type of braid groups on a closed orientable surface $\Sigma$. These are fundamental groups of certain manifolds that are hybrids between symmetric products and configuration spaces of points on $\Sigma$; a class of examples…

We study a wide range of homologically-defined representations of surface braid groups and of mapping class groups of surfaces, including the Lawrence-Bigelow representations of the classical braid groups. These representations naturally…

We investigate representations of mapping class groups of surfaces that arise from the untwisted Drinfeld double of a finite group G, focusing on surfaces without marked points or with one marked point. We obtain concrete descriptions of…

Braided embeddings are embeddings to a product disc bundle so the projection to the first factor is a branched cover. In this paper, we study which branched covers lift to braided embeddings, which is a generalization of the Borsuk-Ulam…

When $\pi:\widetilde{\Sigma}\rightarrow D^2$ is a cover of the disc branched over $n$ marked points, the braid group $B_n$ acts on the disc by homeomorphisms fixing the marked points setwise. A braid $\beta$ \textit{lifts} if there is a…

In this paper, we prove that each automorphism of a surface braid group is induced by a homeomorphism of the underlying surface, provided that this surface is a closed, connected, orientable surface of genus at least 2, and the number of…

The braid monodromy factorization of the branch curve of a surface of general type is known to be an invariant that completely determines the diffeomorphism type of the surface. Calculating this factorization is of high technical…

We construct several families of embeddings of braid groups into mapping class groups of orientable and non-orientable surfaces and prove that they induce the trivial map in stable homology in the orientable case, but not so in the…

In this paper we first show that many braid groups of low genus surfaces have their centers as direct factors. We then give a description of centralizers and normalizers of prime order elements in pure mapping class groups of surfaces with…

We consider the subspace of the homology of a covering space spanned by lifts of simple closed curves. Our main result is the existence of unbranched covers of surfaces where this is a proper subspace. More generally, for a fixed finite…

In this manuscript we prove that if two cuspidal plane curves have equivalent braid monodromy factorizations, then they are smoothly isotopic in the plane. As a consequence of this and the Chisini conjecture, we obtain that if two…

Given a branched cover of manifolds, one can lift homeomorphisms along the cover to obtain a (virtual) homomorphism between mapping class groups. Following a question of Margalit-Winarski, we study the injectivity of this lifting map in the…

The Prym map assigns to each covering of curves a polarized abelian variety. In the case of unramified cyclic covers of curves of genus two, we show that the Prym map is ramified precisely on the locus of bielliptic covers. The key…

The space of monic squarefree complex polynomials has a stratification according to the multiplicities of the critical points. We introduce a method to study these strata by way of the infinite-area translation surface associated to the…

This paper investigates the relationship between strata of abelian differentials and various mapping class groups afforded by means of the topological monodromy representation. Building off of prior work of the authors, we show that the…

A Kauffman bracket on a surface is an invariant for framed links in the thickened surface, satisfying the Kauffman skein relation and multiplicative under superposition. This includes representations of the skein algebra of the surface. We…

We prove that the irreducible components of primitive class Severi varieties of general abelian surfaces are completely determined by the maximal factorization through an isogeny of the maps from the normalized curves.

Every smooth minimal complex algebraic surface of general type, $X$, may be mapped into a moduli space, $\MM_{c_1^2(X), c_2(X)}$, of minimal surfaces of general type, all of which have the same Chern numbers. Using the braid group and braid…

In this paper we prove certain Hurwitz equivalence properties of $B_n$. In particular we prove that for $n=3$ every two Artin's factorizations of $\Delta _3 ^2$ of the form $H_{i_1} ... H_{i_6}, \quad F_{j_1} ... F_{j_6}$ (with $i_k, j_k…

We discuss the equivalence between the categories of certain ribbon graphs and subgroups of the modular group $\Gamma$ and use it to construct exponentially large families of not Hurwitz equivalent simple braid monodromy factorizations of…